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Thursday, April 23, 2009

Dragon Warriors in a Nutshell

I received Dragon Warriors and the Bestiary for my birthday and I've been happily devouring it for the past couple days. My own personal plans are to use the rules as a basis to finally run a Magnamund campaign, but I'd highly recommend the game to anyone who is interested in fantasy more firmly rooted in Medieval history and folklore.

I lifted a bit of the introduction in a comment to Scott over at the World of Thool blog, and I thought I might as well re-post that passage here. I think it sums things up nicely; I know when I read it I started grinning like a kid.

"Our aim was to put something dark, spooky and magical back into fantasy role-playing. Loathing the medieval Disneyland of Dungeons & Dragons, with its theme-park taverns, comedy dwarves and cannon-fodder profusion of monsters, we made [the game setting] as vividly dreamlike as the Middle Ages seem in stories, a place dripping with European folktale sensibility.... Fantasy games like D&D--or, these days, World of Warcraft--belong to the George Lucas or Chris Columbus branch of role-playing. Dragon Warriors would be a movie by Guillermo del Toro or Tim Burton. In literary terms, if D&D is Eragon, then DW is Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell."